Scribe & Gretel: An Interview with Johanna Bundon

Johanna Bundon
Scribe & Gretel
Globe Theatre, Regina
May 4 to 5, 2007


What is Scribe & Gretel?

Scribe & Gretel is a contemporary dance piece that's forty minutes long. It’s for four dancers, Branwyn Bundon, Donald Taruc, Barbara Pallomina and myself, and one musician, Jeff Morton. The piece is an exploration of narrative to a certain extent, the limitations of narrative, an exploration of the form “A, AB, ABC, ABCD” to a cumulative effect and to how we leave traces in space through dance.

Can you talk about the idea of traces, and specifically your use of chalk to make marks throughout the performance?

I think that dancers always have a little bit of envy for, lets say, novelists, painters or visual arts wherein there is some sort of remnant of the work that's been created because dance is ephemeral. I wanted to bring a marking system into the dance to show the patterns that we're always working with in dance, the patterns that are present in the space, the shapes, the forms, the directions that are to a certain extent the formal elements of dance. I think I referred to the role of the chalk at one point as traffic control and this directing is work that would be going on whether the chalk was present or not, but I wanted to use the chalk to reveal this work to an audience.

How did you build the patterns and layers of the choreography?

We had to sort of work backwards. I began working by myself and then was joined by one member of the ensemble at a time. Barbara was the one most responsible for the chalk. She's the scribe in the work. She's essentially like the author of the work. It's like putting the author on stage, so she had to have some knowledge of what was coming next, but it became really obvious that that was gong to be impossible because I didn’t know what was coming next, at all. So we ended up having to work backwards where the piece had to be created before we could feign Barbara directing it.

She was an interesting character because she was not only creating, but also, for much of the piece, observing what was happening with the other characters, which put the audience in this weird space as a third party. Can you talk about how you thought about the audience while creating this piece?

Sure, I had a lot of conversations Lee Henderson about exhibitionism versus voyeurism. I find that the work I'm the most interested in is voyeuristic in nature. There's a certain—it's not disregard for the audience, it's inviting to the audience, but it 's also a certain tone communicating to the audience, “This would be happening even if you weren't here,” or “We're autonomous of you,” or “This has always been happening and this will be happening when you leave.” I think that's a really fascinating tone that can be manufactured in theatre. We ask, “Why is this theatrical? Why doesn't it belong to another medium?” I think when you can suspend an audience’s disbelief of the time shared, and what the limitations of the time shared are, that's what makes this piece theatrical.

Why are you more interested in voyeuristic work than exhibitionist work?

Because I'm not interested in confrontational work. I'm not interested in confronting an audience. If there is something I want to give an audience its permission to watch, permission to be in the space. I don't understand, or it’s definitely not my voice to make an audience uncomfortable in the space.

So you communicate through seduction rather than shock?

Yeah, totally. I want to be drawn in as an audience. I don't want to be cast out of the picture.

Can you talk about any sources for this work?

I always source literary places or maybe language in general. That's what I'm always interested in. The idea for the piece came when I was in Vancouver last spring and I was working with Helen Walkley, a choreographer, on an improvisational score based on fairy tales. I was also working from some poetry I had written around the character of a riddler who narrates these poems and who questions incessantly. Another place was, when I was younger, I never seemed to know the difference between my Bible stories and fairy tales. Noah's arc was always my favourite fairy tale. That started coming back to me a lot over the past year. Why was I drawn to these characters of the Bible more than, say, those of the Grimm brothers? But those were the characters I was interested in, so I started to read specifically Hansel and Gretel and to do a spiritual reading of it, as if it were a parable, because that seems to be the form I like.

You've also mentioned, previously, a book that revisits Noah's Arc.

Yes, Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage is one of my favourite books of all time. Findley sort of bridges the world of the Biblical and the fairy tale in this work, and does it really brilliantly wherein there is a definite line between the female narrative and the male narrative. The male figures in the work are very weak characters. God is presented as this male who is bipolar and lacks endurance in a really big way. Noah is hung up on the idea of sacrifice and is stubborn as all get out and can't get past his need to sacrifice these animals out of tradition, legacy, empire and all of these ideas he's just really attached to, whereas the female characters in the book are like water, are malleable, are imaginative, are dreamers, and are drunk, a lot. They're very malleable, and they're victims to a certain extent.

Along that line of the female versus male voices, can you talk a bit about Donald's character and how you developed that vocabulary?

The image that I had for the piece was of a man downstage left, just lying down on his back for quite a long time before moving. It didn't take long or me to realize that this was Donald’s role and that, to a certain extent, he was the reason that the rest of us were there, be it that his body was the remains of an incident, a calamity, maybe murder, an event of some sort, and that he was holding space for the rest of us to be there but that his story existed in another time. So we started calling Donald's character Noah but in that Noah he represented a lot of the men that I was reading about at the time, like the father in Hansel in Gretel who is quite weak in the story and to a certain extent Jesus in the Bible; I had this idea for a man child, for this very innocent male character. I see Donald’s character as existing in a different time than the rest of us in the piece. He oftentimes is blind to the action of the others. We sort of wove a story about him living in the apartment above the rest of us, as him as sort of a father listening to the events in the apartment below.

By contrast, your character and Branwyn’s character seemed to be very much in the same space and time. Can you talk about the symbiotic relationship between those two roles?

Yes, Bran's my cousin, which is important to point out. We definitely began to refer to our characters as siblings, you know, sometimes naming them Hansel and Gretel. It was the idea of us being in some sort of symbiotic connection, in some sort of partnership where we didn't have a lot of choice, sort of how a family works. There was a certain amount of obligation between us, I found, and hopefully that was reinforced by the unison of our movement.

There really focus on relationships in the piece. It sort of took the bones of a fairy tale and zoomed in on the relationships between characters rather than, say, plot or events.

Relationships were a focus, even a preoccupation for me, but it became evident early in the process that that was my story and maybe not the story of the cast. Essentially, it comes down to the fact the work is physical and that we work physically before we work intention in dance. That’s what makes dance different from theatre.

That’s interesting because artists are often asked whether they start from material or from an idea. So, in dance, you are predominantly starting from your “material”?

I’m not sure if that's the case for everyone. I think that's definitely the case for me. I can think of a very small passage of movement I created last spring and shortly thereafter I wrote a passage that said I want to dance a character named Gretel. I'm pretty sure the movement came first.

Yes, I can remember you focussing on certain elements of your body, like you right hip, and speaking from that area. Can you talk about how that ties to your project and how that starts to mesh together with content?

I think preoccupation is a word that comes up. I’ll be working in the studio and be like, “Oh my god, I'm so fucking hung up on my left hip crest. What is this about?" Left hip crest, right arm and edges of the feet are basically the physical reference points in the body for this work. The more I started to exploit the mechanics of that anatomy, the more I fell into postures. The more I started thinking about those postures, the more those postures lent themselves to characters. The more those characters started to grow, the more the narrative developed. That's the step by step from physical to story for me. Then it was a matter of making all that stuff to dance together. I had to create phrases to explore that postural language and then bring the space inside the body outside into a larger external space, which I think is how we fabricate tone. I knew there was an interrogative, questioning tone in the work. I kept on raising my right arm over and over like, “I have a question.” I started to think about how that question would resound in the space.

In previous projects, you've worked with poetry and text. Can you talk about how your writing practice relates to your dance practice?

I've always had a writing practice, journaling. I normally write about love, almost always. But the part that interests me in writing is the rhythmic dimension of it. It just became really clear to me three or four years ago that rhythmic dimension is totally in alignment with where I dance from. There's the same intonation in my dance composition as in my writing composition. I have a lot less faith in the writing as in the dance, but I have a lot of faith that they’re coming from the same place. The other thing is that element of fatigue in dance is a real limitation of the work, and I think it’s necessary for me to have some other tool of rehearsal or other space in which to think about the work. Writing is a big part of the practice and preparation for the work.

Can you talk about the imagery in the work?

One of the images is that of a girl with her arm raised, as if she has a question in class. Another is of a man lying downstage for a very long time, motionless. Another is a little incline of the head, a quizzical look in the spine. And grasping up. The moving images or phrases in the piece are built around a series of vertical threads hanging in the space, about hanging in those threads, being wrapped in those threads, being controlled in those threads. I'm really interested in the idea of puppeteering and the idea of choreographer as puppeteer. That directorial presence is often a really controlling one and it does pull rank above the interprets in the work, so the puppeteering image is a metaphor for the choreographer/interpret relationship. Those threads are also a testament to this fascination with verticality, with us as upright citizens. I feel like I'm always trying to get more vertical, to stand up straighter, and to be more aligned. What does that mean spiritually? I think I'm quite bound to this image of a vertical god who lives above us.

Do you think that has anything to do with your initial training in the ballet?

Totally, that and being from the prairies. There's definitely a link to ballet and that whole premise in ballet of trying to get higher; the divine being on point trying to levitate to the heavens with it’s the saintly body, that whole world. I also think there is something really powerful about one vertical figure on a horizontal plane, one person standing on the prairies.

A very vulnerable, lonely position.

Yes, very revealing. I'm still negotiating whether we showed progress or a circle. I wanted to show a circle, and not progress. It was this idea of a loop, repetition.

Why was that your focus instead of progression?

I think that goes back to the idea of the relationship with the audience or the space that I'm trying to create, the idea that this would be happening, this has always been happening, that you’re witnessing a chunk of time in this story.

You mentioned earlier that most of what you're writing about is love. Did that factor into Scribe and Gretel at all?

No, well....

Even with the Donald character when he was interacting with other characters, mainly your character?

Mainly…Huh…Yeah, there was definitely a love or an invisible bond with him, or a longing, but I didn't create it as a love story, but maybe I just mean a sexless love…No, I don't think there's a lot of love in the piece.

Which is interesting because dance is so often related to sex, maybe because of the closeness it has to the body and physicality. How do you deal with that history, or maybe the preconceptions audiences have about dance?

Yeah, someone said to me that they couldn't believe how androgynous it was and I was like, “Really?” I hadn't thought about that because I'm quite far from the ballet tradition right now. In the ballet tradition gender roles are so clear, what a woman does. It's formulaic and that doesn't really factor in for me. I definitely don't see gender as a limitation to the movement that we would do or the postures we would find ourselves in.

Does sex or sensuality factor in at all?

Sensuality definitely does.

But not sex?

No, not in this work, maybe partly because of the dynamics of the ensemble. Maybe we sourced that from a real place: Donald is homosexual so there wasn't that energy from him; Bran and I are cousins, so it’s something else entirely. It was more filial, brotherly love, and I think that’s the dynamic I'm attracted to in a working relationship. It helps that Branwyn was there to bring the familial element.

And maybe because there is a theme of innocence or of the child in the piece, seen in Donald's character, the questioning tone, and the fairytale references?

Yes, all of that stuff bulked with the fact that I had a lot of nervousness about the piece being performed in Regina, about who the audience is, about presenting it in a city where my parents live. And to a certain extent I just think it’s not my conversation. Maybe it goes with that whole shocking thing. Maybe I would include sex if there was a way to do it and make people feel very welcome and comfortable!

There was a fifth player in this project, Jeff Morton, the musician. How did you work him into the process?

I didn't work him into the process; Jeff worked himself into the process. I invited him as a collaborator. We had worked together a few times in Robin Poitras work. Jeff is a brilliant jazz musician who is maybe getting further and further from those roots. Jeff and I had a lot of conversations back in January about the idea of error and revealing error. We had some conversations about silence, an avalanche of silence, and how to make silence very loud. It was important for me to have Jeff playing live during the performance, so he did play live on a piano he treated with tuners and felts to get a very dissonant sound. We were very reliant on the rules of improvisation. The improvisation in the dance came earlier in the process, until it became set. When Jeff came into the space he really just went towards improvisation, and he has a really strong foundation in that. He just started playing with noises and we decided what would support the picture, what would challenge the picture. In general, I think Jeff created a lot of the tone in the piece: dissonance, a bit of anxiety, and a lack of resolution. There was something ill at ease in the music.